Ashley Mares

A Dream. A Dream.

Not like when rain says
let everything that breaths

drown. More like drowning
in blush colored water. The

color like cheeks of the girl
with the ripped dress. Not

like the color of Margaret’s
perfume. Not a sweet smelling

fragrance. But water like leather
belts striking skin. Highlighting

the way broken fabric hangs
away from the body. Exposing

rushing waters beneath veins.
Water running through fingers

leaving a pink hue where the body
responded most. Like you

tried scrubbing bloodied fabric
and mostly failed. Pink skin

flushed with death. Alive
like you ripple in heartbeats

and limbs and breaths. Like you
breathe on a mirror. No sharp

edges only moist fingertips
wiping away at skin until it

looks different. Like you
embrace me in

rosewater. Let
me be. And you. And you.

---

Affection

Cover me slowly
in skin and
bring me to my knees.

You say
I have a sweet
taste – licking sugar from

my bones. Inject me with
your blood and tell me how

well we blend. Let me take
your warmth to
ward off

the nightmares.
Dreaming of

blackbirds resting
their wings against

tree branches until
I find them lying
still – wondering

if they’re sleeping or freshly
dead. Only when I’m
mostly whole

am I the object
of your affection. I feel you

chopping away at my
ribs. Taking a blade to my

skin – splitting me in
two – only to realize

it was merely your
fingernails. This
is not a dream.

---

Ashley Mares’ poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Absinthe Poetry Review, Whale Road Review, Rogue Agent, Hermeneutic Chaos, Whiskey Island, White Stag, and others. She is currently completing her J.D. in Monterey, Ca, where she lives with her husband. Read more of her poetry at ashleymarespoetry.wordpress.com and follow her @ash_mares2.

Jackson Holbert

Landscape with Trailer

She sits in the dark,
blows smoke
through the window.

A seam runs
along the back
of her shoulder
and down
her small breasts.

She pulls a pot
off the burner
and turns up the radio.

There are two worlds.
And a seam things pass between.

Into the pot, slow,
she pours the oil.

Outside the window
a tree bends like a violin
with no strings.

---

Jackson Holbert's work has appeared in Thrush, Vinyl, Muzzle, the minnesota review, and Tupelo Quarterly, among others. He currently lives in Waltham, Massachusetts where he is a student at Brandeis University and a poetry editor at the Adroit Journal.

Frederick Pollack

Jardín

In the square, where the fountain
is off, the sellers
of unwanted goods and labor
appear composite, stitched
from scraps of rag and leather,
because they look away, look
down in the dense heat
and the shade of dying leaves.
The tourists look at nothing
although they think they look;
their gaze is stopped
some distance from objects,
in part by the heat,
which must be borne and ignored.

They know (although their knowledge stops
some distance from this too)
they are better off here
than in some other square
they couldn’t tour because they can’t
afford it, or guards; where they might
be kidnapped, then killed
when no one back home
paid; where beggars
and viruses like beggars might
approach them more importunately;
where beggars, eyes dimmed
by rage or glaucoma,
would in a sense not see them.
The all-corrupting heat
disrupts time, though whether
to speed or retard
is unclear, both to the tourists
and the people in the square,
who live in that state.

And the tourists (for this is
of course about them)
look to the hills beyond
the square for an image
of calm: the grand and watered houses
above the motley shacks.
And in their halting way,
they imagine someone who
though small and brown is not
the people in the square.
Who like the tourists yearns to cross
the now-excessive distance
between them and home;
and who, once there, would move
through cool respectful rooms
unknown to the tourists themselves,
replacing heat with warmth.

---

Need to Know

Just outside, she turns. Not with horror –
the view is flat and misty and the horror
immediately dulled, which is the horror.
Nor to plead, for when she turns
she recognizes the angel, heretofore
a gas-cloud of projections. He has
the smug affectlessness
of any guard or enforcer
to come, the flaming sword
another gimmick like a submachine gun.
She can see more or less everything
ahead; lucidity
is Eden viewed from outside.
And the arguments she gabbles
about entrapment, justice, power –
their debut, though they feel rehashed –
neither expect nor intend
a response from Pretty-boy; she only wants
to scope out as much future as she can,
though she knows the knowledge will be taken from her.
She also finds she likes making a scene,
defying script and decorum.
The angel, silent, lifts the sword,
which seems an unnecessary
gesture in context, so perhaps
that was a victory.
She turns and leaves. The earth lies all before her.

---

Genius Loci

Liberals like to think that projects
(“council houses,” “estates”)
around the planet aren’t designed,
unless by someone in an on-site trailer
with so many tons of sandy concrete,
warped boards and drywall, buckled glass,
a kickback and ten minutes to dispose of.
It isn’t true. There’s an architect.
He began in Rome with the eight-story mud
insulae that Nero burned
when the plague got too bad.
Communism, social democracy,
the embarrassment and hypocrisy
of liberalism, the pressured makeshifts
of an older Right paid him.
He saw beyond them, saw the bangas pose
on urinous landings, saw and heard
keening grandmas, pimps and cops
(and here and there the Religious Police)
address reluctant doors, wandering kids
grow lean and cunning, girls
(as in, say, Delhi) eat
the ever-available rat poison
and dance themselves off railings.
An unassuming man, he has
the generalized love
for pullulating human life
of a mainstream poet, the dislike
for argument and categories.
Always in his heart the warm
and yellow lights mount
from earth to sky, offsetting
mildew and swarming floors;
they invite (he knows at his most rapturous)
the jungle and eventual forests
to come. He lives abstemiously, secretly;
the wealth he has earned is unimportant;
what matters is to know one builds for all time.

---

Frederick Pollack is the author of two book-length narrative poems, THE ADVENTURE and HAPPINESS, both published by Story Line Press. A collection of shorter poems, A POVERTY OF WORDS, 2015 from Prolific Press. Another collection, LANDSCAPE WITH MUTANT, to be published by Smokestack Books (UK), 2018. Has appeared in Hudson Review, Salmagundi, Poetry Salzburg Review, Die Gazette (Munich), The Fish Anthology (Ireland), Representations, Magma (UK), Iota (UK), Bateau, Main Street Rag, Fulcrum, etc. Online, poems have appeared in Big Bridge, Allegro, Hamilton Stone Review, Diagram, BlazeVox, The New Hampshire Review, Mudlark, Occupoetry, Faircloth Review, Triggerfish, Thunderdome, etc. Adjunct professor creative writing George Washington University.

Carter Vance

All Things Scarlet

Coming down with something’s case,
fever flush of card suits taken
too literal, whiskey-faced haggling
with diner shop case radio dials,
with dusty countertop linoleum for
a place to rest comforted hands
I am no longer in darkened
rooms with chalk sketches,
with star charts searching June
skies for dusk.
The road polishes, near-reflecting black
of graceful shadowing leaping grandly
from pulpit page to dreaming ink,
it carves a winding gold river band,
a miner’s lung of bespoke ring fingers
from the sketch chart physician’s
notes we made of each other
(flopping haircut, skin strawberry milk shade).
Whirring, fan clatter cuts speech,
to hung ribbon strings from ceiling,
to adolescent party paper chains,
shedding their old tones for
something stronger played:
electric, with feeling.

---

From Primrose Hill

As you turn back in sepia,
Astair-Rodgers light on
Southwark station bends, on
illuminating post-war tenement
brick ways, there isn’t something
more to say,
something more to pause upon.
As you look out on many-wandered
fields, plundered creation
of peace crowns, or scepter
surrenders, as they link in
70s raincoat logic, and
spill full with unsent post,

you aren’t waiting again.

As you draw curtains from
clanging Friday’s air, humid
hanging with pressed lips
of tube driver’s strike talk,
there could still have been
some roiling wave of regret,

for passing taillights of noonhour.

---

Untold Miles

Glory of ember fades,
imperial medals’ twinkling
takes on tea mug tones,
rusty bonnet cap kind
of rushing through cedar
sap places in daydream.

The baking blackness,
electric separation, finding
same holiday greeting card
lines no matter placing truth,
a blistered confession to be made,
of axel wobble sentiments.

Scale of self-help books,
making of wartime lives,
draws rough, approximate, map
of the last time we stood
in subway station tile,
or took to mispronounced names.

Nerves of not-so-young not-quite-lovers
sing still with nicotine twitch,
so signpost obvious in early evening.

---

Carter Vance is a student and aspiring poet originally from Cobourg, Ontario, currently studying at Carleton University in Ottawa. His work has appeared in such publications as The Vehicle, (parenthetical) and F(r)iction, amongst others. He received an Honourable Mention from Contemporary Verse 2's Young Buck Poetry Awards in 2015.

Kenneth Pobo

Pipeline Head

Songs flowed through
my pipeline head--
like Tony Orlando and Dawn’s
“Summer Sand” where Tony and his
it-must-be-a girl lover
wrote “things” in the sand
in the summer of ’71--I couldn’t

walk hand in hand on a beach,
not if I wanted to live.
While the radio dosed us
on heterosexual love,
we needed the dosing
every moment, what would
happen if we weren’t dosed?

My imaginary guy and I
laid on a warm soft bed
of summer sand—
that version missed the Hot 100.

A year later Lou Reed invited me
to take a walk on the wild side.
I knew what he meant,
kind of. I had been dosed
so much, I couldn’t be sure.
Until I took that walk
and summer sand turned
bright lavender.

---

Divine

Outside my Sunday School classroom--
Jesus with flowing hair
looked like he had
just walked out
of a Stockholm salon,
soft-spoken, a TV
with the volume way low, he didn’t seem

real, not the pissed Jesus
who turned tables on
moneycrappers. He I liked,
though once he left the Temple,
he returned to pithy parables
and taking water strolls.

I yearned for a more
kick-ass Jesus
who said fuck when
he had just stubbed his toe.

---

Wandawoowoo off Her Rocker

This is Grandma Sarah’s wooden rocker.
Some nights a sound of rocking
awakens me,
maybe just windy trees.

Throwing up my arms
on a sluggish July day, I drag it
to the curb. The sun’s butt
falls onto it, useful at last.

Trash guys toss it into the truck.
Fearing that I’ve made a mistake,
I dream of Sarah, rocking in mid-air,
unable to get comfortable.

---

Kenneth Pobo won the 2014 Blue Light Book Contest for Bend of Quiet. They published it in 2015. His work appears in: Mudfish, Indiana Review, Caesura, Hawaii Review, and elsewhere.

Katarina Boudreaux

Burial Grounds

Lightning seared
the pecan tree
when the storm
spent itself out.

There was no mark,
but the leaves
fell in cadence
over the next

few months.
After three years,
the saws came
and carved the
body apart.

No one wanted
to bury them
but me.

---

Before Being Served

I remember peeling potatoes
in a kitchen dressed
in cow and sunflower.

A watermelon painted itself
onto the wall;
plastic blinds rattled
as I walked by.

Water splashed
though my fingers
when the call came.

You were there,
but I can’t think of
a single conversation
we had or anything
that would warrant
a road trip from
Chicago to Louisiana
in the heat of the summer.

Then ideals
were dreams
to breathe on, in.
I left before dinner
was even served.

---

Spilling Paint

It was a quarter
for a bag of fish chow,
and you ran to
the car for change.

The bags were
striped like
carnival peanuts,
but the food
smelled like brine.

The water below us
swirled in oranges
and reds.

I pointed out
a flash of white,
and pleased,
began sprinkling
food over the
writhing masses.

You threw your
handful out
all at once,
fodder to
lesser beings.

I don’t remember
the rest of the day.

Just then,
your hand outstretched
and empty,
colors disappearing
beneath us.

---

Katarina Boudreaux is a writer, musician, composer, tango dancer, and teacher -- a shaper of word, sound, and mind. She returned to New Orleans after circuitous journeying. Her chapbook“Anatomy Lessons” is available from Flutter Press. Her play “Awake at 4:30” is a finalist in the 2016Tennessee Williams Festival. www.katarinaboudreaux.com

John Grey

No Highway

May as well put your thumb away for the next ten thousand years.
Hitchhiking is now this dinosaur from the fifties, sixties and seventies.
It wasn't a meteor that took it out but too many news stories
about what can happen when you give a stranger a ride.

Now, if you want to go someplace, you can't rely
on the kindness of people you don't know.
Just try it. Standing on the side of the road
will turn you into a rapist, a serial killer even, before you know it.
Just think about that when you're breathing in all that smoke and dust.

Your hair is still as long as it was then, still tied in that pony-tail
but now it's as gray as the weather in these parts.
And you don't dress any different, except for weddings and funerals.
Jeans are like habit, both as in nuns and in clicking your teeth.
And that new flannel shirt is a descendant of every one you ever wore.

But you were there, bedside, for the slow death of trust.
You remember how the two hour waits turned into three and then four.
There was even a whole day when absolutely no one stopped.
That's when you knew you had a corpse on your hand.
Call it hitchhiking - call it the road -
you've been a line item in an obituary ever since.

Somedays, you look at that thumb with a sense of sorrow,
like it's more than just the first digit of the hand,
capable of opposition and apposition.
It's a ticket to a way of life.
And the ticket's expired. So is the way of life.

---

On a Brief Visit to My Home Town

The road, at least,
follows the old patterns
though most of its traffic
has been siphoned off
by new highways.

I have come here to walk
the streets of that parallel city
from my youth

But, atop the hill,
new mall construction
masks the site of
the old bowling alley.

Rainbow colors
swarm the entrance
Inside
chain stores, food courts,
want at my wallet.

I know,
from a photo album,
the lanes
and the girl about
to swing her arm back
and then under
as she waltzes just short
of the foul line.

I know from a photo album
what I don't know
from any place else.

---

Stella Runs into the Baby's Father at a Wedding

They're actors frozen in tepid applause,
the butcher's son with an ear like a club steak,
the former debutante,
outraged mixture of slow anguish and bottled fury
yet building a nest for her pink shivering offspring.

He's making a hard case for having no interest,
nibbling on canapes like bees on flowers,
giving her the onceover through twelve months of amnesia.

A tray passes under her nose.
She wishes it was a trap door.
Survive first, that's her motto.
Forgive yourself later.
His thick eyebrows graze on one another
like mating snails.
She chokes on what she ever saw in him.
He stares right in her eyes.
She refuses to blush.

She knows she's not at her best.
Her hair feels like steel wool.
His hair is fine. But just look at him,
lusting after every woman's vital organs.
Her resurrection has not been so cheap.
Once, his very name held her hostage.
Now she holds her breath,
impersonates someone who could care less
that she's no longer within his reach, his want.

He hasn't changed,
still infatuated with booze and virgins.
What if she told the world he was the father?
Such an answerable question
at this beer-soaked wedding party.
So she leaves early, one last glance at him
of garbled hate that drops the gauze of politeness.
She'd rather be home with the baby,
where the love is less juvenile
and the secrets are easier to keep.

---

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in New Plains Review, South Carolina Review, Gargoyle and Big Muddy Review with work upcoming in Louisiana Review, Cape Rock and Spoon River Poetry Review.

E. Kristin Anderson

Slammed Open

Summer lightning washed
halted breath,
her throat a rebellion,
mouth opened wide like the glare of God.

Whirled, key turned, blue light
was fine, this time
calling secrets
three hours after,
kept in a flash.

Long and ugly, the looped matrix
fell cleaning, pungent. Time hitched
an invisible rave,
an angel,
a sword,
an idea—
daughter, in a long letter,
close the blood, let it be divine.

---

Teeth Clicking

Gas opened the street at a stroke,
seven minutes before softer girls
worked with wooden horror.

Calls drifted into an invasion,
the graveyard formed white nightgowns
as if pajamas had been funny—

see it lying, a riptide of sky
praying easy, an abyss dirty in her throat.
There was no answer—and why not?

Lightpoles bloomed into dances,
as if the daughter will make this
as brief as possible.

The spring was home when time
decided to glow in the corner,
pounding and cold on the fire.

You just went. You tell it
in your own way.

---

A Great Burning

I guess I turn on easily—
barefoot and laughing while
their dresses scream
sweet soul music.

Empty, nothing changed,
and, trapped, the word
echoed under thumb.

Yes, metal daisies strung
all over the throne tasted
iron. It was raining.

Eyes trace transfixed—
let them all look, power
dazzling, purple burning
just below a full skirt—
conscious thought lost

That mural collapsed,
some obscure town,
just a moment, catching
fingers across Main Street.

My heavy metal twisted back,
exploded upward, hit the street.

In a cruciform pattern,
heart beating, I was trouble
a radio transmission shouting
and on fire. A riot, sure of anything

---

E. Kristen Anderson is the author of seven chapbooks including A GUIDE FOR THE PRACTICAL ABDUCTEE (Red Bird Chapbooks 2014) PRAY, PRAY, PRAY: Poems I wrote to Prince in the middle of the night (Porkbelly Press, 2015), 17 DAYS (ELJ Publications) ACOUSTIC BATTERY LIFE (ELJ 2016), FIRE IN THE SKY (Grey Book Press 2016), and SHE WITNESSES (dancing girl press, 2016). Her nonfiction anthology, DEAR TEEN ME, based on the popular website, was published in October of 2012 by Zest Books (distributed by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) and her next anthologies, HYSTERIA: Writing the Female Body and COME AS YOU ARE (a 90s pop culture anthology) are forthcoming.

**These three poems are erasures taken from Stephen King’s Carrie (1974)

Katie Lewington

A need to bleed

I give you my latest to read –
jumped on the bed
elbow in your stomach
as I lose my balance
perhaps I shouldn’t have woken you?
sorry
go back to sleep

your verdict –
I don’t like it, babe

a shame
because I have written as me -

at least, honestly

what is on the page
as you read
that is what I wrote –
my mind pumping
and
sparks flying –

do you not like me?

have I put up a front and fooled you

now
are you
in love with the wrong
me?

---

Fuzz

derelict lives
sat in front of the television set –
abandoned beach toys

a social disconnect

daughter fucked this afternoon in the back of a car and she is smelling his scent on her skin –
daddy pondered running away from his responsibilities
to beat the rush
this morning whilst in the office and drinking from his grumpy bastard mug –
brother skipped school on his lunch break smoking weed to save himself from starving-
mummy begun to drink red wine gone 10 am feeling as if she could take on the world and bust
stuck up noses with her forehead
and instead –
she makes the beds
and dusts the shelves of
prints

nobody speaks.

---

Katie Lewington is a widely published poet from the UK and likes to review the books she reads, listen to music, daydream, watch Cary Grant films, help The Pithead Chapel journal and Punks Write Poems Press sift through their submissions, sniff 50 year old poetry tomes and enjoy the aesthetic display of many literary magazines. Contact her through Twitter @idontwearahat and her blog https://katiecreativewriterblog.wordpress.com.

James Croal Jackson

Dishwasher

Dredge sponge chunks from the long
day. Necessary sins
dirty your hands. Don’t dig.
Don’t mistake machines for
diamonds. Bubble your hands.
Dishes steam. Enough. You
don’t have to work alone.

---

USA Junkyards

Rust, my lung’s jigsaw.

Exhaust, speaking’s black smoke.

Skid marks. I don’t stop.

Steppes become sycamores.
Deserts become lakes.

Lips, sun-dried
song and stale reed.

Saxophone, barren of sound.

You, between the dents.

The sun, unforgiving.

---

James Croal Jackson's poetry has appeared in The Bitter Oleander, Lines+Stars, Whale Road Review, and other publications. He is the winner of the 2016 William Redding Memorial Poetry Prize sponsored by The Poetry Forum. He currently lives in Columbus, Ohio. Visit him at jimjakk.com.

Wendy Carlisle

Grub

Lyle’s trailer full of banjos and exciters burned down, gone in a flash. Gone the Stratocaster with the bent tuners; gone the Humbuckers and strings. His cousin Allen couldn’t save it though he tried since it was him who set the fire on accident burning yard trash. The Volunteer Fires got there late & stood around a while & watched the melted metal steam, then shook hands all around & drove their big truck off. Folks gathered up what they could, plates & cups & money & still good bed linens plus the usual double-dozen casseroles & dropped them off to his uncle’splace. Lyle ate good for weeks. The morning after the fire even the cat, a stone killer, brought a chipmunk and laid it, still warm, on the rug under Lyle’s microwave. It’s a southern custom, the grief covered-dish. Does anyone still call it grub?

---

Of Motion

In the dream, I am
always in motion always
leaving or arriving, traveling.

After such transit, there comes
the question, what
happened while I was gone

to Paris or Kathmandu? As if
there were answers
in the lawns and side-walks of

waking, as if the hillside
and spring mud
wouldn’t also spin and hurtle

as if each day didn’t migrate,
relocate, shift into a gallop.

---

Little Hats

Six million bats—
less or more—
remember, they
are not little
Draculas or
airborne hats—
thousands of
hibernating
“little browns”
fall all at once
seven species
act strangely
flying outside
in daylight
or in winter
bats clustering
near access to
their hibernacula
seven species
with flesh-eating
fungus on
nose and wing
seven whose
pale snouts
give them away.
Look closer
under your scrutiny
don’t they
just seem
Teddy bear fuzzy?
Their little faces
are so luscious
and the scientists
try so hard
but scientists
are helpless
to find a cure
nevertheless
we must be careful
not to flip
a chicken bone
into their cave.
Who knows
about etiology?

**hibernacula: caves and mines where bats hibernate

---

Wendy Carlisle lives and writes in the Arkansas Ozarks. She is the author of two books, Reading Berryman to the Dog and Discount Fireworks, both Jacaranda Books and four chapbooks, most recently Chapbook from Platypus Press, UK, due in December. See more about her and her work atwww.wendytaylorcarlisle.com.

Paul David Adkins

Discussing the Circumstances behind the Murder of Elliot James “L.D.”Barkley, Inmate Spokesman, Attica Prison Rebellion, September 13th, 1971

“We are men, we are not
beasts,” he challenged Oswald to his face.

After cops rushed The Yard, they yelled Where’s Barkley?
then shot him without a thought after other prisoners broke
like china cups under the shunt of shotguns, billy clubs,
“beaten as such.”

Such bullshit. Stuffed in a Super-Max for a suspended license.

That man stood singly tall.

It’s true, “the sound before the fury.”
The Brother quoted Shakespeare.

What did they know?

Right lung sliced by a sniper
pig-like in a mask.

---

Have You Seen This Man? William “Taxicab” Allen, Murdered Inmate, Attica Prison Rebellion, September 13th, 1971

What can I google of Mr. Allen,
wrapped for 43 years
in the choke and smoke of a trooper’s revolver?
Did he have a daughter, a wife, a criminal record,
a life outside of jail?

His elbow is blown away.

We have been warned.

Within that haze
is a man dispersed
amid two million trillion billion atoms of gunpowder,
ignited and discharged. Somewhere in there
a man is running and raising his hands
as if for a ride honking, impatient at the gate.

---

Attica Prison Rebellion, September 13th, 1971: Even Though the Television Cameras Have Departed the Prison, Murdered Inmate William B. McKinney Still Has Something to Say: Let’s Do It Live!

You think this battle happened years ago,
but I speak for all of us – inmates, guards –
in saying the riot occurs today,

right now. I’m not some philosophical bullshitter.

The psychics can’t detect it with their light meters and microphones, so you’d have to ask my
mother.

Every word is a running man. Every period a bullet. The fists of dotted i’s.

You see we’re busted apart, curled like s’s before the boots’ mid-kick,
truncheons at the height of their arc.

Look hard.

See pickaxes in the t’s. A dead guard is the Y amid The Yard.

Do you not discern us wrapped in sheets of rain?
The bold thwock of the Army chopper, and all those e’s
grinning amid the fallen?

---

Paul David Adkins lives in upstate NY and works as a counselor.

Larry Thacker

Princess

My great-grandmother was no Cherokee princess.
Apparently there were thousands of them anyway.

She was probably Cree, and only thirteen years old
when a man in his thirties took some interest

and adopted/bought/married her, whereupon she
commenced having children over the next fifteen

years, including my grandmother. While she was
without crown and position, I’m confident all that

entitles her to some level of royal acknowledgement.
She deserves a crown of fashioned flowers and feathers

at the head her gravestone, a feather for every child
that lived, a flower for every one that died early,

no halo of sorts, a simple headdress of celebration.

---

Man and Dog

A giant, square upper-bodied man, anchored
with a thin leash to the tiniest husky-like, what?
Some small breed of dog. A cute arm-full for me,

but only a hand-full for this man now tackling
his second heaping platter of chow, seconds
offered by his chattering buddies over brunch

at the VA café, an empty plate and bowl already
tossed to the side, the dog with its camouflage
service vest resting back on its haunches, eyeing

upward, intent at the man’s beard covered mouth,
his large jaw ratcheting mouthfuls of food as big
as the dog’s head one after the other, challenging

the animal’s training of patience and calm, tongue
lolling. The man speaks in grunts, thin-lipped
nods. A toddler skips by and his quickly down

trying to pet the dog, his mother apologizing
quickly, the man now beaming, eyes now alight,
his boom of a voice clear over the room’s crowd,

letting little Nellie know it’s OK to let them pet her,
and to the mother that she loves kids as his huge
fingertips gentle a tiny slice of bacon to the dog.

---

Mars Mission - Crew VIII. Humanities Personnel. 2031.

The scientists and engineers and physicians went out first,
all NASA-nauts, super-competitors, fame-bound from birth
probably, perfect health, perfect teeth and hair, pedigrees,
the 4.5 minute miler geniuses who could research, build,
problem solve and survive for what was left of their lives
on their new inhospitable home of the Mars World Project.

With enough of those sorts there, they were called a colony.

Rumor was one of the first of the scientific crew sent word
after her first year on planet:

>> There is no poetry here <<

Those who knew, knew better, of course. If there were
eyes and ears and lips and tongues, minds and fingers
there on the planet, beating hearts, poetry existed.
But who would create this strange new language?

There was a call for a one-way-trip historian, teacher,
song-writer, artist, novelist, and yes, even a red planet poet.

Critics were ruthless. A television show based how zero
gravity effected creativity and the mind, with dozens
of artists crammed into a satellite commune for a year,
with two voted off each week with the help of the audience,
only lasted a single season. It was a terrible plan.

The experts took over.

It morphed too bureaucratic, of course, with calls
for applications and corporatized mission statements:

Q: Why do you want to write poems on Mars?
A: Who could resist but to write poetry for Mars?

Crew VIII, specific to Humanities Personnel, was a response
to that strange one sentence cry for help. And that’s what
we knew it to be, we humanities experts, we “touchy-feely
thinkers” as we were known, the underfunded storytellers,
we cave painters, we stump-sitting philosophers soon to be
shot to the stars to ruminate on the what ifs of rocks and sand.
But more than anything to venture past the world of binary
0s and 1s, though all our umbilical lives were linked there,
to give the sociologists and anthropologists more than math
to wonder on, to offer posterity so much more than:

>> Sol 1: Sunrise: 7:37 – Unremarkable <<

---

Larry D. Thacker is a writer and artist from Tennessee. His poetry can be found in journals and magazines such as The Still Journal, The Southern Poetry Anthology: Tennessee, Mojave River Review, Broad River Review, Harpoon Review, Rappahannock Review, and Appalachian Heritage. He is the author of Mountain Mysteries: The Mystic Traditions of Appalachia, the poetry chapbooks, Voice Hunting and Memory Train and the forthcoming full collection Drifting in Awe. He is presently taking his MFA in poetry and fiction at West Virginia Wesleyan College.

Josh Smith

Begin Again

When the plane crashed down, there were no survivors.
Survival implies rescue and a return to normal life.

We who lived were born again, in the truest sense.

As if expelled from the womb of a giraffe,
our landing was bracing, messy, but we walked away.

Between the strata and the terra, many found God;

there are no atheists when plummeting ten-thousand feet.

I believe those who found her, must have expressed zeal to unite —
the only believers, the corpses that chose their Valhalla.

For when we collected the living, there were no deities between us.

---

The Last Scene of Struggling

I know where it is.

I know where the bottle is.

It’s in a bag, taped under the lid of the toilet tank.

And you know what’s in that bottle:
Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey!

I quit drinking for the third time, last week.

My wife cleaned out the liquor cabinet, the basement cooler,
even the shoebox in the attic that I didn’t think she knew about.

But I snuck one by,
because I knew.

I knew that THIS ASSHOLE was going to go 30mph in a 55mph,
for fifteen fucking minutes!

I was mad when I realized it was a no-passing zone.

I was livid five minutes later, when he hadn’t turned his blinker off.
When I got close enough to see the cell phone in his hands,

I was ready to kill.

YOU MISERABLE, ARROGANT SHITHEAD!

I’m not a bad guy. I get angry, but hey,

I don’t beat my wife, or set the neighbor’s cat on fire.

But if God himself doesn’t drop an asteroid on this prick,
I swear to Jeebus, I’m gonna grab that bottle,

and I’m gonna pour myself a drink.

And then another. And then another. Until the bottle is empty.
And then I’m gonna buy another. And another.

And some fucking pills too, Lord.

And I’m going to sit on my toilet, and I’m gonna drink,
I’m gonna swallow pills, and I’m gonna smoke.

Yeah, I almost forgot that!

I’m gonna drink, and smoke, and swallow pills
until I go out like Fat Elvis.

Because it’s either him or me, God:
you can’t have us both!

Either you drop an asteroid on this prick,
or me and Jack are checking out.

Tick, tock, Lord.
Tick, fucking tock.

---

This I Believe

I believe in one true God the father almighty dolla dolla bills y’all come back now ya hear me now believe me later days and days on end of time to play the game on to the next one more night and day trip over extended line of credit where credit is due west of the city slicker than oil and water cooler conversation piece of my mind your own business time of our life is beautiful bastard child of mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the dawn of creation of man I’vegotta get away from here is gone forever and ever and the Rock means ever had your ass kicked by a black man before and after market value our time out of the way of the Do Do bird call me anytime at all together now hear this is it is what it is that all or nothing more nothing less than perfect circle of trust me when I say these words can’t express check out the rack on her daddy must have been a thief in the night knight! Her honeydew is overdue for the things I would do. Oh how I would slide- slip, slip-slide, slip her the tongue and breathe into her ear a tale of

fantasy blasphemy mastery imagery sugary fiery watery intensity density sensory battery
flattery dastardly tragedy bigamy (Big of me? Big of you!) whataboutme (What about
Raven?) holy gory glory finally idly carnally direly directly wiry travesty

for her pleasure.
For her plea, sure.

I hide my love in the hyphenated vortices of Jupiter’s rings, my heart emulsified.
I nail myself to the cross of dreams to be crucified.

Put one hand here, and with the other hand, hear.

Here, hear the music we’ve made.

She says that the echoes of despair leave no imprints in darkness
as they travel on their way to nothingness.
I love her brain, and for fifty bucks,

she’ll blow my mind with no diminutive verbiage.

We say thank you to the stars — can we do it again?

We surrender the superfluous, we renounce the facetious,
and abate the reprobate within.

---

Josh Smith isn’t sure if he’s followed poetry, or if it’s taken him. In either case, he’s been with it to eight states thus far, not including: dysphoria, glee, or ennui. There haven’t been millions of dollars,or scores of salacious fan interactions. However, there has been publication of his work by the likes of Rampike, the Buffalo News, and Ploughshares.

Nathanael William Stolte

mapmaker

transubstantiating
wine
into wanton captivity
&
grain
not into bread or eternal life—
but into
hungers staying power

deriding
ancestral
warnings

the delusion of control
calling
to mind
another time
another day
another torment
when things were—
manageable

i’ve been a devil
drawn to the immutable
poetry church
unable to save myself
unwilling to save others
ignorant—
of the power in
brokenness

loud-talking
trash-man
speaking
in the
intrinsic
wisdom of the
tramp

transmogrification
in an alchemical
reaction of spirit
elemental
magic
of the
doomsaying
bottlemen

cartographer
in the
archipelago
of damnation

mapping truths
that can only be lived
that can only be gained
through experience

---

Gifts Ungiven

When I was 15, Zack de la Rocha told me with a whisper
Your anger is a gift
I didn’t understand what he was giving me
I didn’t understand what this meant
But I liked the way it sounded
Still do
His words have stayed with me through the decades
Branded into my heart

When I was 25, Vic Ruggiero told me
Every day the human race is filling me with more disgrace
This I understood
These words have been a mantra
As I’ve trudged in heavy boots
Through a cringe-worthy world

When I was 35, she asked me
Why don’t you write love poems?
Or poems about nature?

Darling,
Every poem I write is a love poem
While Mother slowly dies
Everything I do is an expression of love

Look around—
This place
The way we treat one another
The way we value
Imaginary assets &
Fiscal idolatry
Over bodies
Over trees

Is a maddening disgrace
That shames us all

The modern day Atlantis is in the
Pacific Ocean
It’s made of North American rubbish
It’s not getting any smaller

Toxic algae blooms
Choking the coastal beaches
It is said that by 2050
There will be more
Plastic in the oceans
Than fish

When Her last hummingbird
Fills the air with its final poetry
Will we regret what we’ve swapped?

When the last aquatic mammal
Choking on our excess
Curses us with life on a dead stone
Will we look to the sun?

So yeah,
This is a love poem
And I am angry
And it’s a gift

---

Unformed Creature

In Wappinger Falls New York there is old magic
A Buddhist Monastery at the bottom of Overlook Mountain
With tattered prayer flags and a silent stillness that is strangely comfortable
The temple was simple and ornate at the same time
Monks tend the needs of this sacred place
In crimson and mustard robes
With broken English through unbreakable smiles

Overlook Mountain is the southernmost peak of the Catskill Escarpment
It hides its own treasures
The hike is a couple hours up to the fire watchtower
Less time back down- gravities old trick
The purple sky reflects in mud puddles from autumns final rain showers
Hidden around a bend in the path
So it seemingly materializes out of nothing is the bones of an old hotel
Only the concrete remains
Maples, some older than me, grow out of the dirt where a grand entrance
Once welcomed the affluent
Once opulent fountains are full of filth and rain and garbage
Moss covered stone and stair and wall, wet and complacent.
Fireplaces, with remains, some vandals or lost souls
Seeking refuge in this abandoned place left behind
Spray paint scars the masonry
Bright, red, and vulgar
Much like my own scars
I feel akin to this place
Haunting, still, and broken
Up the mountain, there is a scenic overlook where five or so states can be seen.
A cliff bluff, dropping off into the void.
Conifers, as stately as anything human hands could build
Stretch to the Hudson River, where Amtrak trains look like toys and
Riverboats crawl along the thin vein of life through this valley of commerce.
Up here, where there are dates all the way back to the 1800’s carved into the rock shelf
None of these comforts can get to me
Just the strength of the wind and vertigo
Stirring something deep inside, something older than me
It is Beggars Night, the night before All Hallows’ Eve, 2014
The saints watching quietly
We shamble down the mountain in the moons embrace
Unafraid

Down the road from the Monastery lies another holy place
Hallowed ground
The Chapel of the Sacred Mirrors
Where a different kind of magic is born

It was Samhain
A woman
Name of Ka
Did a Serpent Feathers dance
That was something to behold
I was enthralled by the movements of this woman
Part angel
Part bird
All something you can’t put words to
The music was ubiquitous
When Ka finished her first dance
You could feel gooseflesh ebb across the room
Ka did another dance that was slower
Mesmerizing
When she finished her final dance
I looked around
All the woman in the circle
Surrounding the sacred space
She performed her craft were in tears
I felt nothing
There were men
Also moved to tears from the beauty
Or meaning in this dance
That I somehow couldn’t gather

Like an unformed creature
I missed some enchantment
Some brilliance
Right in front of my rapt gaze
It’s as if something hasn’t matured in me
Or has been neglected so long it’s now
Too rusty
Too corroded
To move
Too many moving parts
Unmoved for
Too many years.

---

Nathanael William Stolte is the author of three full length chapbooks, A Beggars Book of Poems,Bumblebee Petting Zoo, & Fools’ Song. He is the author of three mini chapbooks, 9 by N.W.S., 8 by N.W.S., & 7 by N.W.S. His poems have appeared in Ghost City Review, Guide to Kulture Journal, Five to One Magazine, & Plurality Press. He is a co-founder of CWPCollective Press. He is also co- founder of Cringe-Worthy Poets Collective, a small band of young poets attempting to make literary poetry more approachable for the youths’. He was voted best poet in Buffalo by Artvoice, “Best of Buffalo” in 2016. He is a madcap, D.I.Y. Buffalo bred & corn-fed poet.

Julio Montalvo Valentin

Coming from where I’m from

Muffled crooked needles that rattle veins under forearms
Can be heard, shattering in the back of the building.
Didn’t need to look to wheezing skies when
People where he’s from
Throw their shooting stars out at night.

The dope boys wear fitted’s, Yankee cocked back but
Loaded Jimmy Hats can be found clinging to every floor.
Just lust released from the corner when
People where she’s from
Disregard future kids dead or gone in staircases.

Faded chalked lines encasing the life of a “project” man
Can’t be found after all the commas he made
To project out of the hood
From where I’m from and into this poem
Where words, not girls, play hopscotch on his worth.

---

Heart Attack #1

After nine revolutions around noon’s brightest star,
My clock died.
Like dad’s boat,
I tick down to slow, unanimated sigh
Into the obscure.

Waves of hands keep me afloat
Above the ocean playground.
Like dad’s boat,
My cabin light dims in the stomach of the abyss,
A starless night.
Even the moon isn’t as lonely as I.

Two steel eels with corded tails
Charge and charge the failing battery,
Like dad’s boat,
It jumps the engine awake.
I finally cough exhaust until I whimper a roar.
“Welcome back son” the doctor says.

---

Obsolete

Skittish mainframe creaks and exhausts air on every step
with blurred perceptions in the window of my soul
and a hard-drive without updates.
Plenty of corrupted files to attend to
before the power button runs out of power.

No longer the man the world built me to be,
a durable man,
a sturdy man,
a working man,
a man who runs like a machine,
a man whose sometimes obscene,
a man who loves to drink,
a man without chinks,
a man who is either before or past his prime, a man who has the time,
and keep up with your time.

With memories of once was
that will never be again,
my goldfish mind restarts.
5 minutes ‘til another memory is gone.
5 minutes ‘til another memory is gone.

My ticking ticker is barely ticking
As a second hand tinkers the past.
When they open me up,
I hope they change me from the inside
So that I live to be used again.

---

Julio Montalvo Valentin is a semi-confessional, socially awkward poet. As cofounder of Cringe Worthy Poets Collective, he aims to make poetry accessible while engaging in deep topics with simplistic writing. He has published two chapbooks, "Don't Give up the Ship" in 2015 and "Ship Lost" in 2016, both with Cringe Worthy Press.

Scott Kristopher

in the beginning there was love

In your all hallowed eyes
The illusions of my perceptions are
Beginning to completely unravel.

There it is revealed that your smile
Was always where you hid the
Love you needed to keep disguised.

Only now that you have donned this mask do I see you truly as you are.

Love of this intense nature
Is impossible to reciprocate
Here in this masquerade of self.

At least now I finally know that
The possession of my abandoned heart could
End the haunting of my scattered soul.

---

holloween

There is nothing
Left
To be said

No thing remains
To be salvaged
_____

An excavation
So incomplete
That even the rubble
Has been replaced
With an emptiness so perfect
That this space
Will not exist for
An eternity of nothingness

A hollowing out
So invasive
That implosion
Has been predicted
With an inevitability so flawed
That this time
Will never forget
A single memory
_____

Here was everything
Right
To be done

All things return
To be saved

---

Scott Kristopher is a Book Artist and Storyteller from Buffalo, NY. He is also a Barista. In a past life, he was trained to be a disciplined Social Scientist; and in some life before that he was most likelya Baobab Tree...

Benjamin Brindise

The Girl in the Passenger Seat

She sits in the passenger seat
after leaving words in the spaces
between the yellow dotted lines
of the highway behind us

I only see it out of the corner of my eye
- I don't turn my head
I don't want to steal looks at things
that have nothing to do with me

But I can't help the shadows cast
as her hands wrangle through her hair
like her finger tips are chasing root ends
that never tied themselves up

Wringing herself clean to songs of freedom
It must be a tiresome process
And even though I believe that
those words taste dead upon my tongue

I have yet to find what being free means
best not to project my short comings
on other people

---

Finger Paints

I smell finger paints

I’m in third grade and my art teacher
has told me I can paint anything I want

So I paint the stars –
and a spaceship flying among them,
because in third grade, the only thing I wanted

WAS TO TAKE OFF

The little problems look small from a launch pad –
They look even smaller from up in space
It starts big,

an epic scene of dog-fighting, lasers,
barrel rolls and fiery explosions
Squadrons of brave soldiers taking up arms
against some imperialist, totalitarian rule
the main antagonist in the most bad ass ship
the whole thing propelled by thousands of years
of back story and fan fiction

There is a narrative here, I’m sure of it –
but I can’t quite find the thread

Something about people who have important things to do doing them,
and me, I’m just here to take record, but
that battle in the back corner seems a little sloppy –
So I cover it in black paint to give more focus to center stage
At home, there are battles, too
Ones my art teacher never sees
because I cover them in black paint before I come in for class –
I don’t want to take up space
with things that only matter to me

I want epic battles between destined people
Heroes that the universe has lifted up –
I wanted to hear or say anything
that takes attention away from the bloodstain
on my bedroom rug
And the dogfight taking up the left part of the page
is out of proportion with the rest
so I black it out, too
And fill the space with small white dots
The kind that fill my vision
when I clamp my eyes shut, but no tears come
This is all I know of stars –
All the best one’s I’ve known
are the ones they kept covered up
And on second thought,

the main star destroyer looks like a rusty Ford Escort
I have to admit I am not good at painting
The real world never seems to match the images in my head
The black paint is so stuck on my finger tips
it begins to leave a mark on everything I touch
Prints I didn’t mean to leave
that will dry, flake, and turn to rust
follow me home like extra footsteps
when you’re the last one off the bus
My art teacher told me I could paint anything I want

and all I’m trying to figure out is how I fucked that up

I black out the star destroyer

There’s only one battle left.

It’s off in the back and it’s just one ship against one ship

Something most people would have never noticed otherwise

I cover the rest of the frame in black

I dot it all with stars

leaving that one dogfight in the back

The one no one noticed, center stage

I painted something I want

---

Vaudeville

I have cleaned up well
There is a show tonight

My rows of seats ready, spread
so that everyone gets a view

The floors are clean
no where to get stuck when they file in

And everyone with a ticket gets a seat
My silver screen shows demons defeated

by heroes splashed in empty computer graphics
Just to make sure we know that heroes aren’t real

We have reached the future -
And tonight, there is a man coming for his fifteen minutes of fame

Bringing songs with melodies made of click-clack’s
baring all the skin we keep in safe spaces

He has been instructed in houses like mine
living rooms in America filled with more guns than people

more trigger pulls than words
He is coming with guns he bought online

just like his ticket
to the show

---

Benjamin Brindise (b. 1987) is an American writer of fiction and poetry as well as a Teaching Artist at the Just Buffalo Literary Center. He is a PSI certified spoken-word poet who qualified to compete in the 2015 and 2016 National Poetry Slam. He has been a guest speaker and workshop facilitator at multiple institutes for higher learning throughout New York State and Canada.

Gary Glauber

Lost Amid Clutter

She left her frenzied passion
in a kitchen drawer
where no one would find it,
deep within the cabin
surrounded by black pine forest
hidden hard within
the far side’s mountain range.
Such wilderness proves a reckless sprawl,
overgrowth and underbrush,
vegetative rage reaching out
in spindles and filaments,
nature’s supervening force
of ferns and green forgiveness.

There it sits dormant,
unable to crush innocent hearts
or force brazen behaviors
upon unsuspecting victims,
a powerful maelstrom
that can corrupt and bewilder,
coax and wheedle and transform lives.
It waits, a genie trapped,
for some unsuspecting weekend warrior
to someday uncover, in horror and delight.

Her life now is gray and simple,
a pale reminder of
young rush and thrum,
a distant birdsong
heard on the wind.

---

Noon at the Palace

The neon fuchsia azalea wall
provides entry to the garden’s peacock palette,
surrounded by copper beech and hemlock shadow.

Stepping gingerly on slate teardrops,
directed by inner flames and a smirking wind,
hollow revelations are swept through imagined twilight.

Invisible planets gather in circles to discuss loss,
the emptiness of eternity,
the lean thrill of repeated orbit,
the lazy labor of gravitational pull.

Do you not see the colors fade?

We bludgeon details that signify
ancient timelines and guiding tides.
Forsaken tourists, we listen,
then quickly turn to leave.

---

Gary Glauber is a poet, fiction writer, teacher, and former music journalist. His works have received multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations. He champions the underdog to the melodic rhythms of obscure power pop. His collection, Small Consolations (Aldrich Press) is available through Amazon, as is a chapbook, Memory Marries Desire (Finishing Line Press).

Skyler Jaye Rutkowski

A Mountain of Past-Lives and the Things I’ve Learned

I'm always learning mountains from other people.
Things like:
How climbing into courage takes
the use of knives, sometimes.
How someone can dig up the cracked skulls of
past lives with their bare hands.
How the let go can be the hardest part for one person,
and somehow the easiest part for the other.

Some mountains I've learned should have come with "falling rock" signs,
A way to warn bystanders of what's to come.
I would beg forgiveness if I thought I needed to,
Bash my knees into learned solitude of a varied terrain.
But we'll blame it on the people who taught me hate:

I.
A woman. Watched wicked hands drape a black ribbon around inexperienced wrists.
Her eyes burn into naive ribcages while they were broken by bartering men.
The darkness ate her. She let it devour her daughter.
There were seven years of bad luck for every bottle she broke with her teeth
Passed on the omen to her children.
Left them stranded in her cursed slurs while their childhood rotted beneath her addict touch.
Found homes in men paying rent with a daughter’s body.She never apologized.

II.
A cavalier smile of a man with black ribbons for hands
Sawed the bones of a girl with dreams bigger than a home she was buried in.
Her lips bled for every year she saw
his predatory eyes in other people.
He never flinched at the bile in her throat, and she never stopped bleeding.
A home draped in lust. Built the bridge from innocence to damaged with the friction between his thighs, led straight to a door he walked out of.
The disappearance act of a man with decomposing skin left space
between answers I was too young to ask.
I'll live cautious until an obituary is written.

III.
An artist with a blemished tongue.
Busted stenciled-out fist marks found on the pale skin
of his lover.
Swallowed the world out of her.
Took the body of a broken thing.
Broke it harder.
Warning signs flashed above blue rimmed glasses and beneath broken fingernails.
He was a heartbeat dripping sins.
I still feel healed bruises when I think of him.
A mixed medium of objections and unapologetic wounds.
Some days the climb gives me the vertigo of falling into too much.
The mountain grew on shattered livelihood
And I've been stumbling my way through since
before I knew what lessons were.
What it meant to resent.
I'm always tracing back defeated footsteps knowing exactly where they'll take me,
Always hoping they won't.

---

Home Sweet Home

It’s the sunray spackles on my pale back, and the red vintage
Rug on my living room floor that make me want to buy
One of those cheesy “Home Sweet Home” signs
The kind that people only ever get as gifts because
If it really felt like home, you wouldn’t need the sign to prove it.

You’d smell it in the chocolate-chip cookie air and feel it
In the green-thumb breeze flowing through your orchids above
The kitchen sink. But this is different.
I want the sign to hang as a plaque above my head to
Remind me that I have a home again.

Some mornings, I’ll wake up from the chill coming through my window,
It takes me a moment to realize that I can stay.
And that I want to.

See, I’ve always had commitment issues with places.
Always had an itch on the side of my ankle that made me
Want to skip the sidewalks of new cities.

Staying too long always made me feel stagnant.
Which in theory, isn’t a good thing to be.
I forget that trees are planted so they could grow.
That without stop signs, we’d wake to morning car crashes.

I could blame my aversion to homes by the twenty-three I had
And lost
In my first fourteen years, but it could be
From all the concrete I swallowed every time I
Tripped up on denial.
Having a home always tasted like hard places.

It’s drinking tea and talking politics around my kitchen table,
Putting on facemasks and watching romantic comedies,
Eating pizza while writing poetry;
All of these are the perpetual circumstances of being alive in a home.

When the last four places you stayed gave you rug-burn on the welcome mat.

Sometimes living in a space that you don’t fit into feels like being reprimanded for dishonesty.
Like the brick walls know all the secrets you’ve been keeping
And they want to bury you;
Drip pieces of your lies from the drywall, paint chips splatter
Onto your artwork and expose you.

I’ve heard people say that someone’s home is an extension of themselves,
But I want to know about someone without a home.

Are they so full of who they are that they don’t need one?
Or are they just not anyone at all?
I know that as a kid, I considered myself a bad-luck charm.
I thought that eviction was etched into a pattern through the freckles on my face.

If home is an extension of who you are,
That explains why I was walked past waving “need food” signs while
Warming the curbs of the west side at seven.
Or how I was the only one who was able to taste “help” from the air
in my throat at eight. I barely remember the nine elementary schools
I went to, but I remember hiding an eviction notice from my mom
In a diary for so long, that when the police came to say
Our thirty days were overdue, I told them
That it didn’t count if she didn’t read it.

I can’t remember every street we walked and
Slept on, but I’m here now.
And I’ve been thinking of finding a local shop
That engraves permanence into wood.
I’ll grab a “My First Home” sign, hang it on the solid wall
Above my bed.
I’ll reach out to the extensions of my personality.
Maybe I’ll see it in the art on my walls,
Or hidden in the empty spaces of my bookcase.
I’ll sing Home Sweet Home when I see it.

---

Star Party

One of my favorite things to do is ask for
Secrets. I like harboring words that are only meant for me.
Sometimes I’ll see them dance across your skin in the movements
You make, or hide themselves in furrowed eyebrows.

Giving away secrets makes you a story teller, and
I’m craving the kind of knowledge that only comes from listening
To the creaks in a person’s voice, or the octave of their laughter.

I think the secrets of a person’s character can be found in the things
They talk about, I think sometimes it can be found in the things
They won’t.

Someone once said that my secrets game seemed to be a
Void filler for gaps in genuine conversation.
But I just don’t think they understand.

I find silence in dialogue to be just as telling as the words we’re speaking
But I know what it’s like to have galaxies clogging your throat.
When you’re trying to be heard but your words are sucked into
A black hole and it feels like the big bang was really out to get you.

I’m not trying to pull dark matter from your teeth,
I ask as an invite to spill the cosmos from your lungs the way
I wish I knew how to.

Sometimes our thoughts are eclipsed by the world
Around us, I want to offer a space for
Meteor showers.

So tell me.
Tell me how you think of nightmares even in the daytime.
How your best friends addiction is a battle you’re not sure
You can win.
The way that eyelashes against your cheek make you think
Of the last person you learned to love.
I want to know which superhero you wanted to save you
When you were young.
Tell me anything you want me to know.

I don’t want to have to borrow a Barlow Lens to see that you
Cannot find a way to touch the equinox.
That you can’t plant your foot on anything because you forgot
How to be grounded.

Sometimes speaking our thoughts puts our life into retrograde,
But I just want to know you.
I want you to feel like a Nova.
A star, explosively shedding your layers without
Destroying yourself.
Leave endings to the supernovas,
Fill your chest with star dust,
We’ll have a star party to see the solstice in you.

Remember that your brightness can change
Over the course of a day, year, life;
You are a variable star.
The twilights in your mind got us here.

We can reach the zenith from here.
Stand on our toes and stretch our
Arms overhead until we capture every inch of truth
In the waning of a moon.
You’ll never be a gibbous to me.

There’s a cluster on your tongue
Waiting to spill.

---

Skyler Jaye Rutkowski is a poet from Buffalo. She's a recent graduate from SUNY Fredonia with a Bachelors in International Relations. She currently runs writing workshops, often in her chaotic home, and spends a large portion of her time avoiding cliches.